Web Structure Analysis

I have recently been part of a group of researchers at Rutgers studying methods for analyzing web structure analysis. This phrase is chosen as the title of this page only because I cannot think of a better name -- other possibilities include link analysis, but that has other connotations, topic distillation and Kleinberg's graph-based analysis of hypermedia.

Anyway, we have identified three groups doing similar research:

Kleinberg's original work including the CLEVER project at IBM
Digital Research's Web Archeology group
Stanford's Google search engine project

We have been working to understand and compare these methods, and to consider their performance as means of ranking the importance of web pages. Once this survey is complete, we also plan to investigate related questions and likely propose our own variant on these methods.

Some of the papers we have been studing include:

From Kleinberg's work and the IBM Almaden Research Center's CLEVER project:
- Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment. Jon Kleinberg. Proc. 9th ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, 1998. Also appears as IBM Research Report RJ 10076, May 1997. PDF format available.
- Inferring Web communities from link topology. D. Gibson, J. Kleinberg, P. Raghavan. Proc. 9th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia, 1998. PDF format available.
- Automatic resource list compilation by analyzing hyperlink structure and associated text. S. Chakrabarti, B. Dom, D. Gibson, J. Kleinberg, P. Raghavan, S. Rajagopalan, Proceedings 7th International World Wide Web Conference, 1998.
- Experiments in Topic Distillation. S. Chakrabarti, B. Dom, D. Gibson, S.R. Kumar, P. Raghavan, S. Rajagopalan and A. Tomkins. ACM SIGIR workshop on Hypertext Information Retrieval on the Web (1998), Melbourne, Australia.
From the Web Archeology project at Digital Research:
- Improved Algorithms for Topic Distillation in Hyperlinked Environments. Krishna Bharat and Monika R. Henzinger. Proceedings of the 21st International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, 1998.
- The connectivity server: Fast access to linkage information on the Web Krishna Bharat, Andrei Broder, Monika Henzinger, Puneet Kumar, and Suresh Venkatasubramanian. Proceedings of the 7th International World Wide Web Conference, pages 469-477, April 1998.
From Stanford's Google:
- The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page. Proceedings of the 7th International World Wide Web Conference, April 1998
- The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web Lawrence Page, Sergey Brin, Rajeev Motwani, and Terry Winograd. Work in progress.

Last modified: September 10, 1998

Brian D. Davison